WASHINGTON (RNS) Everyone on Twitter is learning that a hashtag cuts both ways — it can be hijacked or lampooned by detractors, and it’s a key way that online activists are pushing back against opposing messages or what some might even call hate speech.

(RNS) Organizers say the new conference will show that while the Catholic hierarchy is split on how to address contemporary challenges to marriage and family life, the church can nonetheless seek common ground with religious leaders outside the Vatican.

NEW YORK (RNS) Hillsong founder Brian Houston said that the victim who came forward to him asked him not to tell the police about his father’s sexual abuse. “I would’ve gone to the police,” he said, if he had known about abuse reporting laws.

NEW YORK (RNS) “I think theologians are often terrified of what we’ll discover when we go more deeply into human character if we say that a person had very complicated relationships with character, psychology, formation and sexuality,” says Dietrich Bonhoeffer biographer Charles Marsh.